Humans

By Colin Barras
The type of beads used in Chumash necklaces may also have been currency
Alamy Stock Photo

PEOPLE living in what is now California may have been the first Americans to invent money, according to a new analysis of shell beads produced 2000 years ago by the Chumash, a Native American community.
There is general agreement that money existed in the Americas before Europeans arrived. The Chumash’s beads, fashioned from the shells of purple dwarf olive sea snails (Olivella biplicata), are seen as a classic example of this.
“Almost all the scholars who focus on the Chumash have agreed that the shell beads were money,” says Lynn … More

By Adam Vaughan
There is increasing awareness of racial inequality in science funding
Skynesher/Getty Images

Just 10 senior researchers who received public funding in the UK during 2018-19 were Black, the first breakdown of UK science funding by individual ethnic groups reveals. The number, just 0.5 per cent of the total, was described as “profoundly upsetting” by the government body in charge of funding.
Racial inequalities in funding by the UK’s seven research councils, which coordinate around £8 billion of government cash, have come under growing scrutiny in the past year. But the disparities between ethnic minorities have been masked by lumping individual ethnicities together under the banner of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME).
Researchers can apply for three categories of funding, in descending seniority: principal investigator (PI), co-investigator or fellow. Today, data published by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which coordinates the research councils, shows that just 10 Black researchers were awarded PI funding. Out of the total 2045 PI roles funded, 210 went to people from an ethnic minority.

Advertisement

Of the fellows who received funding, just 60 were from an ethnic minority, compared with 250 white fellows. The number of Black fellows is so low – between one and four – that UKRI didn’t release the number for fear of identifying individuals. That picture isn’t new, the organisation says: between 2014 and 2019 there has always been fewer than five Black fellows each year.
As the UKRI points out, both of these proportions are below the proportion of Black people in academia and the wider labour market, while the figures for co-investigator were more in line.
“It shows that funded Black applicants are vanishingly small,” says Izzy Jayasinghe at the University of Sheffield, UK, who is a member of The Inclusion Group for Equity in Research in STEMM (TIGERS). The figures show that Black applicants are underfunded by at least three times what would be expected given their wider labour market proportion, she says.
Michael Sulu at University College London, also a member of TIGERS, says: “It tells you everything you would assume, which is essentially that black staff must work with others to gain funding as a co-investigator and are unlikely to be leaders.”

By comparison, researchers of Asian ethnicity received a higher proportion of funding compared to the proportion of Asian people in academia and the wider jobs market. This appears to be the driving force behind the proportion of ethnic minority co-investigators growing between 2014 and 2015. From 2016-17 onwards, those researchers exceeded the ethnic minority proportion of academia and the labour market.

Ottoline Leyser at UKRI said in a statement: “These data spotlight the stark reality of the persistent systemic racial inequalities experienced in the research and innovation system. They are profoundly upsetting, but perhaps the most upsetting thing about them is that they are not surprising.”
More on these topics: More

“Know thyself” is a piece of wisdom handed down from the ancients – but a slew of delusions and biases means you might be better off asking someone else

Humans 9 December 2020
By Alison George
The delusional Don Quixote and his faithful squire Sancho Panza in the 2018 film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Alamy Stock Photo

Can you ever truly know yourself?
DON QUIXOTE is one of the most celebrated characters in literature. The hero of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel, first published in 1605, decides to act out his knightly aspirations, performing acts of great chivalry and righting wrongs. So he thinks, anyway. Sadly, the gulf between his self-perception and how the world views him is vast – so much so that the word “quixotic” has come to describe delusional behaviour.
But here is a troubling thought. What if we are all more quixotic than we allow for? We might think that with our privileged access to our every thought and motivation, we are the best judge of our own character, but what if we aren’t?
In recent decades, psychologists have revealed that we are beholden to all sorts of biases and mental blind spots that put a positive spin on our characters. In one study from the 1960s of drivers hospitalised by car accidents, for instance, all judged their driving ability to be better than average.
This “illusory superiority” bias has been demonstrated many times since. Indeed, it turns out that the worse we are at a particular task, the less likely we are to recognise our own incompetence – something known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. And we are crashingly unaware of all of this: while we recognise the impact of bias in other people’s judgements, we miss it in our own.
It isn’t all bad news though. In a seminal study a decade … More

Most of us instinctively think that our sense of self is located in our head – but experiments show that our brains aren’t working alone in creating our sense of self

Humans 9 December 2020
By Alison George

Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Where is your self?
FOR the Ancient Egyptians, it was the heart. For philosopher René Descartes, it was somewhere entirely separate from the body. According to the Buddhist concept of anatta, it isn’t anywhere, because the thing concerned doesn’t exist.
But what does modern science say about where your self – your “soul”, if you like – resides?
At first pass, that might not seem a particularly scientific question. Regardless, most of us have an intuitive answer. When, in as-yet unpublished work, Christina Starmans and her colleagues showed people from the US and India pictures of flies circling around a person, and asked which flies they thought were closest, the results were striking: regardless of cultural background, most people pointed to flies near a person’s eyes. “This suggests there is a universal sense of the self being located in the head, near the eyes,” says Starmans, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada.
Subjectively at least, the eyes being windows to the soul checks out. “The sense of where in our bodies we are located is informed by our dominant experience of the world,” says Starmans. “Almost all of our input from the world comes in through our head.”
What our heads do with these inputs is certainly incredible, and key to our feeling that we are coherent beings. Our brains take a hotchpotch of electrical messages from our sense organs – eyes, ears, nose, skin – and combine them with memories to create a vivid, unified sense of conscious experience that is continuous in time.
How exactly this happens is still something of a mystery. But … More

We have a strong sense of continuous, coherent existence – yet from the cells that make our bodies to our defining character traits, we are in a constant state of change

Humans 9 December 2020
By Tiffany O’Callaghan
Each of us shows many differing faces over time
Getty Images

Are you always the same person?
MY MOM sometimes jokes that it is fortunate she didn’t meet my dad when he was in college, because she wouldn’t have liked him. She was (and is) a self-described goody two shoes. Dad not so much, but presumably even less so when keg parties were involved.
We know that we change over time. Our bodies grow, then age; we mature and our views shift; our memories sharpen and fade. Yet for most of us, our sense of self is seamless and continuous. You are the same old you, right?
Let’s start with the physical. Some of our cells, notably neurons in the brain, are with us from before birth, and can live more than 100 years. “Most of the nerve cells in the brain are actually as old as we are,” says molecular biologist Jonas Frisén at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
But most of our cells aren’t. Some, including certain kinds of white blood cell, live for only days. How quickly our skin cells are replenished changes as we age, but in general it takes about a month. The notion that the liver regenerates every 40 days or so is a myth: our liver cells live 200 to 300 days.
On the level of atoms and molecules, meanwhile, we are exchanging material with our environment with abandon. Think of your body like a grassy field, says Frisén. “It’s the same lawn from year to year, but each strand of grass is completely different.”
But what about less tangible … More

Foreign cells within our bodies help determine our mental states and even contribute to our immune defences – making it tricky to define where you end and the others begin

Humans 9 December 2020
By Graham Lawton

imageBROKER/Alamy

Where are your boundaries?
“Studies show we think of ourselves now and in the future as different people”
DELINEATING where a person begins and ends used to be quite simple. While philosophers might have tied themselves in knots trying to define the self, and biologists still struggle to locate its steering mechanism (see “Where is your self?”), what it encompassed, at least, was more clear-cut.
Their traditional definition comprises three elements, says Thomas Bosch at the University of Kiel, Germany: the mind, the genome and the immune system. Each of us is a self-contained organism defined by our mind and genes, with the immune system patrolling our borders and discriminating between self and non-self. Me, myself and I.
Then we looked more closely, and our relationship status went from “threesome” to “it’s complicated”.
For starters, we are chimeras: some parts of us are human, but genetically not “us”. Most, if not all, of us contain a few cells from our mother, our grandmothers and even elder siblings that infiltrated our bodies in the uterus.
Women who have carried children host such cells too. “Something like 65 per cent of women, even in their 70s, when autopsies were performed, had cells in their brains that were not theirs,” says David Linden at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Chimeric cells have been found to contribute to both good and bad health, for example promoting wound healing but also triggering autoimmune disease.
A handful of people even turn out to be true chimeras, created from a merger in the uterus of two non-identical, “fraternal” twins. We don’t know how common this … More

Understanding how individual we all are means grappling with genetics and neuroscience. Unique: The new science of human individuality by David Linden is a great place to start

Humans 9 December 2020
By Clare Wilson
Studying twins has shed light on the heritability of people’s personality
MStudioImages/Getty Images

Unique: The new science of human individuality
David Linden
Hachette
IN 1979, the US public was fascinated by news coverage of the “Jim twins”, a pair of identical twin brothers who were adopted at birth by different families, only to find each other at the age of 39.
The coincidence of their matching first names wasn’t their only similarity. They weren’t mirror duplicates of each other, in looks or temperament, but both worked in law enforcement and their hobby was carpentry. Both owned Chevrolets and took … More

According to the laws of physics, everything we do follows inevitably from what happened before – and yet we’re convinced we can change the world. Can we?

Humans 9 December 2020
By Richard Webb
If you don’t want to read this, put the magazine down now
Getty Images/Image Source

Are you predetermined?
WHAT are you doing right now? Reading these words. Why? Presumably because you chose to. Even if you didn’t – if you are encountering them years in the future lining a forgotten box of crockery in the attic, say – you can always choose to look away now. You possess the nebulous quality of human free will.
Nebulous because, despite debating it for millennia, philosophers have been unable to pin it down – and although we are pretty convinced we have it, at some level it must be an illusion, rather like our sense of self is (see “Are you always the same person?”).
Let’s start with the physics. Whenever you decide something, a certain pattern of neurons fires in your brain to turn your thought into action – moving towards the kitchen to make coffee, perhaps, or formulating an utterance you will come to regret. Ultimately, that is all down to pulses of electrons – fundamental particles that follow the cast-iron laws of physics, under which everything is determined by what happened immediately before.
That doesn’t leave much room for free will, apparently. “Physical laws, if they’re deterministic, tell me that everything that I do, everything that happens in the world, including everything that I do, including every decision I ever made, follows logically from the laws of nature [and] the initial conditions of the universe,” says philosopher of physics Jenann Ismael at Columbia University in New York. Since we control neither the laws of nature nor the initial conditions of the universe, we … More